Association in hot water over boiler inspection break-ins

A housing association has been placed under Housing Corporation supervision after inspectors found it broke into some tenants’ homes in order to service gas boilers.

Audit Commission inspectors said on wednesday that Bradford-based Brunel & Family Housing Association regularly used duplicate keys or force to enter homes to do repairs. The report said: “The association must urgently review this approach.”

Forced entry is illegal unless the gas system is dangerous. But Brunel & Family forced entry or used duplicate keys 55 times between April 2003 and February 2004.

Nick Atkin, the Audit Commission’s head of housing, said: “We would question the legality of keeping spare keys. The normal process is to use the tenancy agreement and processes through the courts. The numbers seem high.”

The inspectors also said Brunel & Family had not met the sector’s regulatory code and “fails to demonstrate continuous capacity for improvement”.

The repairs service regularly overspent and was almost £100,000 over budget in 2003/4.

And inspectors were concerned about the allocation of homes, with some of the process relying on individual staff discretion rather than a points system.

“The association is failing to keep audit trails for lettings decisions and is unable to demonstrate that allocations are made fairly or in accordance with its policy,” the report said.

As part of the supervision, the corporation appointed three people to the board of Brunel. They are: Alison Thain, chief executive of Tees Valley Housing Group; Andrew Taylor, finance director of Sunderland Housing Group; and Guy Darby, former chair of Willow Park Housing Trust.

Margaret Street, the association’s chief executive, said: “While disappointed with the inspectors’ final assessment of our association, we recognise many of the issues identified in the report and accept many of their findings.

“However, we have already made significant progress to improve the association’s performance since the inspection in March.”

She said the association would no longer use forced entry to get into homes for gas safety checks and would use injunctions instead. “Every letter to do with gas safety inspections is now hand-delivered,” she added.

She said the association had also introduced proper audit trails for allocations of homes.